Gayane Vardoyan

Assistant Professor — UMass Amherst CICS
Gayane Vardoyan

About Me

I am an Assistant Professor at the College of Information and Computer Sciences, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

From 2022 to 2024, I was an Assistant Professor at QuTech's Quantum Internet Division, and EEMCS, TU Delft, receiving a permanent contract in 2023. The same year, I became faculty part-time at UMass Amherst, switching to full-time in 2024.

Previously, I was a postdoc researcher at TU Delft, where I worked with Prof. Stephanie Wehner. I received my PhD from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where I worked in systems and networking. My advisor was Prof. Don Towsley.

My research interests focus on the modelling and performance analysis of distributed quantum systems. I received my Master of Science in 2017 from UMass Amherst. I interned at Inria in Sophia Antipolis, France in Summer 2017. I received my Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California at Berkeley. Between my undergraduate and graduate education, I worked at the Argonne National Lab and the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago.

Recruiting

I am currently looking for driven PhD students wishing to conduct research in the area of quantum communication. Interested candidates may apply either through my personal portal or through the graduate school.

Research Overview

As the idea of a Quantum Internet draws nearer to reality, protocols must be developed to enable users to reap as many of the potential benefits of this new technology as possible. A fundamental challenge in quantum networking is long-distance entanglement distribution — to actualize such a task with near-term quantum devices of limited functionality, special care is needed to ensure that quantum-equipped users have entanglement of sufficiently high quality at their disposal.

One focus of my group is thus to develop efficient entanglement distribution algorithms, often inspired both by analytical models of quantum network architectures, as well as techniques found in classical networking literature. In general, the group is interested in addressing the many challenges pertaining to distributed quantum systems, as well as seeking new quantum-enabled possibilities and applications.

Publications

News

Curriculum Vitae

Quantum Communication (COMPSCI 590QC/690QC)

I developed this course in 2024/2025 and first taught it in the Spring 2025 semester at UMass CICS.
Please feel free to use these resources and adapt them to your courses.
My only request is that you notify me of any discovered mistakes!

Weeks 1/2: Basics of Quantum Theory
Week 3: From Pure to Mixed States
Weeks 4/5: Entanglement
Week 6: Entanglement Generation
Week 7: First Applications
Week 8: Quantum Key Distribution
Week 9: Long-distance Quantum Communication
Week 10: Coping with Noise
Week 11: Basic Quantum Error Correction
Week 12: More Applications

Postdoc (Current)

Leonardo Bacciottini

Leonardo Bacciottini

PhD (Current)

Luise Prielinger

Luise Prielinger

Eric Yau

Eric Yau

Meghashrita Das

Meghashrita Das

Master (Past)

Héctor Calero Mas

Héctor Calero Mas

Undergraduate (Current)

  • Avni Gunjikar

Undergraduate (Past)

  • Boris Goranov
  • Aksel Tacettin
  • Tianchen Qu
  • Ioana-Lisandra Drăgănescu
  • Ionut Ciobanu